IGN Chats with Howard Berger

Howard Berger: Well the big thing was that after the last film we had a lot to live up to, I mean we felt all the stuff we did in the first one was really great but it could be better, and so at the end of Lion and the Witch, when we started Prince Caspian, we thought: ‘Okay, here’s how we’re going to do things differently.’ I mean it wasn’t like, we need to use new materials or anything like that, we just kind of refined our techniques. Think of it as a puzzle piece – the way you build all the mechanical heads was very specific – we had suits to put together, and make-ups and we had to think of a way for them to be more time-efficient, because we had at least 150 who were on the set all day. I don’t actually think the technology has improved that much since the previous film, I think artistically they progressed and that’s what we really spent more time on – the finer detail – more about quality than quantity.

IGN: It seems like the film has a darker tone…

HB: Absolutely. I mean there’s a line in the film where Peter [Dinklage], who plays [Trumpkin], says ‘You might not recognise Narnia, it’s a more savage place.’ And that is basically the whole idea. It’s been one year that the kids have been away from Narnia but it’s been 1300 years in Narnia time, so the Telmarines have come into power, and they have basically exiled and exterminated a tremendous amount of the Narnians, so the ones that are still alive have been in hiding and they’re very primal and primitive and have forgotten their ways, you know? The friendly bear Lucy would have known before is now a vicious wild animal, and so it’s absolutely a darker and more unpredictable tone, it’s not like: ‘Hey welcome to Narnia it’s wonderful’ in Lion, where the only threat was an eternal winter and the White Witch: every turn could be a danger.

For some who may have missed an earlier interview with Howard Berger, he confirmed that he would be designing a handful of Narnians aboard the Dawn Treader. You can read about that here.

IGN also has a Creatures of Narnia video go to with the interview that you can check out here.